(Arctic Studies Center & Liaocheng University)
Forgotten chapters from the history of the Ural-Altaic theory – impressions from two decades of research into the history of science
68th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Bangkok 2026
Almost twenty years ago, the speaker wrote a history of the Ural-Altaic theory in the form of a monograph, which he initially intended to submit as his habilitation thesis. However, he abandoned this plan due to the fact that the necessary materials for various ‘chapters’ of the research history could not be obtained or were not readily available at the time. Several of the chapters that had not been written or could not be written around two decades ago were then developed by the speaker over the years and published as smaller contributions – such as the question of the Ainu-Altaic relationship, as allegedly postulated by N. Poppe (1897-1991), J. C. Street (1930-2017) and others, the lexical comparisons by P.-Ch. Levesque (1736-1812), the Altaic notes by A. F. Pott (1802-1887), G. H. A. Ewald’s (1803-1875) remarks on the ‘Nordic’ (= “Turkic”) languages, the life and work of the (Ural-)Altaicist Eugen Büge (1859-1936), the ‘Mongolian’-Sino-Déné 26comparisons of Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800-1894), the classification of the ‘Mongolian’ languages by R. G. Latham (1812-1888) and, most recently, Gyula Rohonyi’s (1852-1920) idiosyncratic family tree model of the Ural-Altaic languages and peoples, which the speaker presented in Shanghai just last year.
Much of this is likely to be unfamiliar to today’s readers/listeners, as we tend to associate Ural-Altaic research with names such as R. K. Rask, A. Boller, W. Schott, W. Bang Kaup or H. Winkler, and perhaps also with the typological undertakings of W. v. Humboldt or F. M. Müller. Furthermore, the ‘chapters’ of research history discussed by the speaker in recent years have sometimes been located rather on the margins of the history of Ural-Altaic theory. Nevertheless, they are part of the complete picture and absolutely indispensable for a comprehensive treatment of the subject. Many other chapters still need to be written before such a complete account of the research history of the Ural-Altaic theory can be presented, or indeed before such an account can even be attempted!
In his lecture, the speaker will illustrate this using two selected examples – Joseph Edkins’ (1823-1905) posthumous manuscript ‘Proof that the Japanese language belongs to the Ural-Altaic stem and is more distantly related to the European tongues’ and F. L. O. Roehrig’s (1819-1908) Ural-Altaic-American Indian comparisons – to illustrate this point.